The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Debunking America's Scarborough Shoal Dolchstoss Meme

... or “Goodbye
Honest Broker”

Whoever is rolling out the new US maritime strategy for East
Asia apparently regards the Financial Times as his or her chosen
instrument. The FT, for its part,
appears to believe that it completes its journalistic mission by reporting the
US position, and sees no need to examine the US claims in detail, a shortcoming
I intend to remedy in this piece.

In recent months, the US has come to two broad conclusions
about its approach to the South China Sea. The first is that its efforts at
deterrence are having only limited impact. Despite considerable US attention
and rhetoric since 2010, China has slowly continued to shift the status quo in
ways that are rattling both many of its neighbours and the US.

The second is that US military strategy in the region has to
some extent been asking the wrong question. For several years, some of the
Pentagon’s best minds have been focused on how the US would win a protracted
war with China and have come up with a new concept – known as AirSea Battle –
to ensure continued access of US aircraft and ships to contested areas during a
conflict.

However, the reality is that
Washington is facing a very different military challenge, a creeping assertion
of control by the Chinese that often involves civilian rather than naval
vessels – the sort of grey area that would not normally warrant any response
from the US.

The
solution doesn’t appear particularly impressive on the surface: basically
naming and shaming through increased and closer US surveillance.

More important,
perhaps, is the thrust of the second article: an effort to paint the PRC as the
guys who cheated at the game, rather than outplayed the United States. That is important because the United States
has taken another step in shedding its threadbare “honest broker” costume, and
is adopting a more overtly confrontational posture in backing the PRC’s
overmatched local adversaries and imposing the US strategic and tactical agenda
on the region.

And that,
it appears, requires getting rewrite on the phone for some creative history.

The event
in question is the scuffle over the Scarborough Shoal in 2012. In an attempt to assert Philippine
sovereignty, Manila apprehended some Chinese fishermen poaching protected
shellfish in the shoal and made a point of broadcasting pictures of them with
their ill-gotten conch. Two Chinese
maritime patrol vessels appeared, and the Philippines withdrew without
detaining the fisherman.

In June 2012, senior US and Chinese officials met in a hotel
in southern Virginia to discuss a dangerous two-month stand-off taking place in
the South China Sea.

At the time, dozens of government vessels and fishing ships
from China and the Philippines were massed in the lagoon of Scarborough Shoal, a reef 120
nautical miles from the Philippines’ coast claimed by both countries. A naval
conflict seemed a real possibility.

With typhoon season fast approaching, the US tried to broker
a resolution. By the end of the meeting between Kurt Campbell, then the top US
diplomat for Asia, and Fu Ying, China’s vice foreign minister for Asia, the US
side believed they had an agreement for both sides to withdraw. The following
week, the Philippines ships left the Scarborough Shoal and returned home. The
Chinese, however, stayed in the area.

The Scarborough Shoal case played a big role in another part
of the new approach by the US and its allies: the appeal to the courts. Albert
del Rosario told the FT that it was the “catalyst” for Manila’s decision to
bring China to an international court over its expansive claims in the South
China Sea.

Even though there is still considerable resentment over the
way events in Scarborough Shoal unfolded, the Obama administration has shown no
willingness to reopen the issue and push for a Chinese withdrawal.

Speaking last month at a conference in Singapore, Ms Fu
denied there had been any deal between her and US diplomats in 2012. “I do not
know what agreement you are referring to,” she said. The Chinese vessels did
not leave the area because they feared the Philippines might double-cross them.

“All China is doing is to keep an eye on the island for fear
that the Philippines would do it again,” said Ms Fu.

US officials tell a different story, insisting there was a
clear understanding at the 2012 meeting that the Chinese would take the idea of
a mutual withdrawal from Scarborough Shoal back to senior leaders in Beijing.

They say it is unclear whether Ms Fu really tried to sell
the agreement in Beijing or whether the foreign ministry was overruled by more
hawkish elements in the Chinese system, including the military.

This is pretty weak beer.

And I will add my considered opinion
that any scenario based on the PRC agreeing to US mediation in its dealings
with the Philippines is, for lack of a nicer word, horsepucky.

The PRC’s detestation of
internationalization of its one-sided scrum with the Philippines is a byword in
Chinese diplomacy. Maybe as a courtesy,
Mdme. Fu agreed to transmit the U.S. proposal back to Beijing; most likely, the
leadership’s decision would have been to reject any U.S. involvement in the
matter. Indeed, as shown below, the
record in the Philippine media supports this interpretation.

What was really going on in June
2012 seems not to have been the rape of Kurt Campbell’s injured innocence by the dastardly
Chinese; more likely it was a carnival of collusion, incompetence, and bad faith, with
Philippine Foreign Minister Alberto Del Rosario at its center.

Negotiations with the Chinese were
not in the hands of Campbell or, for that matter, Del Rosario.

President Aquino had despaired of
achieving diplomatic engagement with the PRC over the Scarborough Shoal issue
through Del Rosario—a China-bashing fire eater—and had instead opened a back
channel to the PRC through a senator, Antonio Trillanes IV. (Del Rosario
apparently retaliated by dispatching an ex-business associate of his to Beijing
to represent himself as Del Rosario’s own informal envoy and further muddy the
waters.)

Trillanes was not just engaged in occasional
chit-chat. He apparently was the
recognized conduit for behind the scenes engagement between the Philippines and
the PRC, claiming to have met with the PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs sixteen
times concerning the Scarborough matter between May and July 2012. Presumably, he met more than once with Fu Ying
who, in addition to acting as Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs for Asia, had
previously served as ambassador to the Philippines and was entrusted with presenting
the smiling PRC face to the Phillipines.

In an attempt to discredit Trillanes
and his channel, the Speaker of the Philippine Senate, Juan Ponce Enrile flayed
Trillanes’ efforts when they came to light in September 2012.

Excercising the government’s
prerogative of leaking classified information when political necessity demands,
Enrile introduced some confidential notes from the Philippine ambassador to the
PRC, whom Trillanes briefed on his talks, and added his own vituperative
remarks in order to provide the most unfavorable gloss on Trillanes’ actions.

The notes are not particularly
damning to Trillanes, and they do characterize the nature of Campbell's contacts with Fu rather persuasively:

“There was never any negotiation between the Chinese and
the Americans, just a meeting with Kurt Campbell. Mr Campbell was not a
negotiator. Besides, Secretary del Rosario was not there.”

Rather unambiguously albeit
awkwardly, President Aquino credited Trillanes with negotiating the mutual
climbdown…and in September 2012, far from repudiating Trillanes, confirmed that
the senator was still his informal envoy.

Aquino was asked about the Palace statement that Trillanes
achieved “minor successes” in his role as backdoor negotiator.

The President said Trillanes’ work helped reduce the number
of Chinese vessels in Scarborough Shoal, deescalating the tension. Aquino was
however unsure about the exact number.

As to how the withdrawal actually played
out, Philippine journalist Ellen Tordesillas provided this timeline in 2012:

Days before President
Aquino left for London and the United States, Fu Ying was in Washington D.C and
met with Kurt Campbell, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and
Pacific Affairs.

DFA and Chinese sources said Campbell suggested a simultaneous withdrawal of
vessels from Panatag Shoal to de-escalate the tension.

A DFA official said United States Ambassador to Manila Harry Thomas relayed to
Del Rosario that Beijing has agreed to a simultaneous withdrawal.

This is the “agreement” Del Rosario said Beijing reneged on. He referred to
this agreement in several statements.

…
Chinese sources said what happened in Washington was that Fu Ying told Campbell
she would relay the suggestion to Beijing.

Bejing said they would “gradually pull out” of the disputed shoal. “There was
never a commitment for a total pullout,” a Chinese source said, explaining that
“they have a domestic audience to consider.”

China has always been against the intervention of the U.S. in conflict in Asia
and sources said the Chinese officials did not appreciate it that the Americans
were negotiating for the Philippines.

Based on Thomas’ confirmation, Del Rosario ordered the pullout of Philippine
vessels in the middle of the night. By morning, the President was displeased
that Del Rosario had made that order. So he called Trillanes to ask the Chinese
why their ships remained in the area when the Philippines had already pulled
out.

Trillanes was unaware of such an agreement coursed through the U.S. Following
the President’s orders, he called his counterpart in China to follow the
Philippine move, since both countries had already agreed on a “simultaneous
pullout.”

The Chinese sent word to Aquino, through Trillanes, that they would issue a
statement to explain the back-to-port order of their ships, and asked that they
be given 48 hours to relay the orders to appropriate agencies in Beijing.

Aquino departed for London and the U.S., relieved that the tension had
de-escalated.

The Philippines said it pulled out its ships to safety because of the bad
weather in Scarborough Shoal. China for its part said they will go back to port
to re-supply.

But before China could complete the pullout, the DFA issued a statement
accusing China of reneging on an agreement. This angered China, which insisted
there was no such agreement.

It seems quite likely that this
account, and not the FT’s, hews closer to the facts. For reasons of practicality (Fu was already
in negotiations with Aquino’s designated envoy, Trillanes) and principal (US
involvement in bilateral PRC-Philippine disputes were to be discouraged), it
seems unlikely that Fu was luring Kurt down the garden path.

Neither, for that matter, is it particularly
credible that Campbell would believe America’s blinding “honest broker” charisma would
persuade a vice foreign minister to sign off on a fundamental change in the PRC strategy of bilateral dispute resolution, and settle a Philippine issue without
the Philippine foreign minister even in the room.

Tit-for-tat, as opposed to
simultaneous, withdrawal was being discussed between Trillanes and the PRC, per
the Philippine ambassador’s notes:

“The arrangement being looked at by the senator, meaning
Senator Trillanes, was one side would leave first then the other side then the
next, etc. They were talking about the manner of evacuating the Scarborough. He
then received a call from PNoy [Philippine President Benigno Aquino III],
saying why are the Chinese still there when there was an agreement for
simultaneous withdrawal. He thought to himself, ‘This is not the arrangement.’
He was protecting the Chinese.” [I’ll go out on a short limb & infer that
the ambassador meant Trillanes was “defending” not “protecting” the Chinese--PL.]

The confusion created by Del Rosario’s
assertion that the PRC had committed to a simultaneous withdrawal, and his
denunciations of the Chinese for reneging, are palpable.

At the time, the PRC made the point
that it felt Del Rosario, in denouncing the PRC for its failure to withdraw its
ships simultaneously, was talking through his hat, both through official and
unofficial channels.

Philippine Foreign Affairs Secretary Albert del Rosario said
Friday that Manila is waiting for Beijing to meet its commitment to remove its
vessels that remain in the lagoon of Huangyan Island after the only Philippine
ship there left this week.

In response to Del Rosario's remarks, Hong questioned where
and when the Philippine side received such a commitment from China.

He urged the Philippines to constrain its words and deeds
and do more things that are conducive to the development of bilateral ties.

Zhuang Guotu, director of the Center for Southeast Asian
Studies at Xiamen University, told the Global Times, a tabloid of the Communist
Party-owned People's Daily that "China has never made commitments that it
would pull out from the waters around the island. The Philippine side is saying
this to get out of an awkward situation."

Nevertheless, the PRC did take
action in support of the de-escalation process.

On June 18, the PRC announced it
would be removing the 20 fishing vessels inside the lagoon:

"Due to the inclement weather and strong tide in the
Huangyan Island (Panatag Shoal) waters, in order to help Chinese fishermen and
fishing boats pull out safely for shelter, Nanhaijiu-115 vessel has set out to
the area to provide necessary assistance," the Embassy said in a statement
posted on its website on Sunday.

…

In fact, according to Del Rosario himself,
on June 25 the shoal was completely clear of all ships, Chinese and Philippino,
an awkward state of affairs that the FT account of Chinese duplicity fails to
address.

Two days later, however, the PRC ships
were back. Supposedly, the PRC took
umbrage at President Aquino’s statement that the Philippines would fly
surveillance aircraft over the shoal (and, I would expect, also took exception to statements
by the Philippine defense ministry that it was imperative that Philippines take
control of the shoal to pre-empt any Chinese return).

Perhaps the underlying reason was
that the PRC realized that the Trillanes channel had completely imploded, the
initiative lay with Del Rosario, and there best option was to return to the
status quo ante (after symbolically vacating the shoal for a couple days to
indicate it could and would honor the undertakings it made through Trillanes).

The PRC re-established its presence
at the shoal, which it maintains to this day.
Currently PRC vessels control entrance to the shoal via a cable strung
across the mouth, and occasionally even accommodate the entry of some Philippine
fishing vessels.

As to the second order consequences,
observers are welcome to speculate that Foreign Minister Rosario was either a
clueless ass who abruptly ordered the Philippine vessels to vacate the shoal on
the unilateral say-so of the US ambassador despite the PRC’s long-standing
insistence on bilateral negotiations (which indeed were ongoing), without any
confirmation from the main Beijing negotiating channel, and without informing
his president…

…or he presumed upon whatever
statement the US ambassador passed to him to assert the existence of a
fictitious agreement for simultaneous evacuation in order a precipitous
unilateral evacuation so he could accuse the Chinese of bad faith, torpedo the
deal, and foreclose a bilateral PRC-Philippine process that kept Del Rosario (and the US) on the
outside looking in.

Malacañang is leaving it up to the Department of Foreign Affairs
(DFA) to answer China’s claim that it never committed to pull out its
vessels from the disputed Panatag (Scarborough) Shoal.

“First off, the commitment has always been to deescalate tensions; to
always be sensitive about what is being said. Second, we will defer to
the DFA to respond to that particular issue,” deputy presidential
spokesperson Abigail Valte said.

Given this context, it is not
surprising that Del Rosario felt compelled to offer his resignation to Aquino
over the Scarborough brouhaha, which Aquino declined. A sense of discomfort within the Philippine
establishment concerning Del Rosario’s confrontational agenda can be seen in
the publication of a heated defense of his incendiary anti-Chinese diplomacy at
ASEAN in July 2012.

Del Rosario further muddied the waters
in September 2012 by claiming rather unconvincingly he had negotiated the fatal
deal with the PRC’s ambassador to the Philippines, Ma Keqing, which needless to
say conflicts with both the Trillanes and the Campbell versions, both of which
are predicated on the premise that Del Rosario was not effective as an
interlocutor with the Chinese.

As to the declaration that the
United States and Philippines were pushed beyond their endurance by PRC perfidy
and finally decided more in sorrow than in anger to pursue the Philippine case
through a lawsuit before the International Tribunal of the Law of the Sea, it
appears that the US had already hung its hat on shifting the Scarborough
dispute to an international forum before the simultaneous vs. alternating
evacuation unpleasantness played out.

A US official on Thursday said Washington supports the
Philippine initiative to resolve the dispute between Manila and Beijing over
Panatag Shoal through legal means…

Joy Yamamoto, political section counselor and acting deputy
chief of mission of the US embassy in Manila, echoed [Ambassador] Thomas’
statement.

“We have been very consistent throughout this dispute in supporting
international law in settlement of dispute, so we continue to support China and
the Philippines to settle the issue through international means,” said
Yamamoto.

With this context, my personal construction would be that
the tenor of Kurt Campbell’s representations to Mdme. Fu Ying in Virginia in
early June might have been along the lines of: “Withdraw from the shoal. Otherwise the US will encourage a Philippine
legal challenge to the 9-dash line.”

With the eager assistance of Del Rosario, failure was
pretty much pre-ordained and the Philippines took their case to arbitration.

Now the question is begged as to
why, two years after the fact--and despite a public record that calls its version of events into serious question--the United States deems it necessary to publicly
promote a Scarborough Dolchstoss
(“stabbed in the back” for you non-German speakers) meme at this particular
time.

First of all, US South China Sea
policy needs a reboot. To quote the FT: “Our
efforts to deter China [in the South China Sea] have clearly not worked,” said
a senior US official.

In 2010, the US justified its
attention to the remote reaches of the SCS on the grounds of “a national
interest in freedom of navigation”.

The substantive US interest in
freedom of navigation—the freedom of US military vessels to conduct
surveillance within the PRC EEZ—was de
facto conceded by the PRC pretty promptly.
On the other hand, since the PRC was relies on freedom of navigation for
commercial traffic to an existential degree (most of the traffic through the
SCS is, after all, going to and from Chinese ports), there was an embarrassing
dearth of Chinese offenses against freedom of navigation that compelled US
action.

While sedulously protecting freedom
of navigation (and studiously declining to take positions on sovereignty
issues), the United States had no direct riposte to the most conspicuous PRC
exercise of outrance in the South China Sea: the dispatch of the HYSY 981 drilling
rig into disputed waters off the Paracel Islands.

In simpler times, the US might have
been willing to concede that the PRC had the stronger case than Vietnam thanks
to its conspicuously exercised sovereignty over the Paracels, and Vietnam’s Vietnam
was only muddying the waters by deploying the politics of outrage to sustain
its claim.

But these are complicated times, and
the United States, Philippines, and Japan have clubbed together to ensure that
Vietnam is spared the embarrassment of acknowledging PRC sovereignty over the
Paracels, divvying up the overlapping EEZs accordingly, and, perhaps, putting
one festering South China Sea problem in the rear view mirror.

Failure to deter the HYSY 981
exploit would seem to require that the definition of the US national interest
in the South China Sea be redefined to enable more effective pushback,
preferably pushback that carries the threat of the PRC’s least-desired outcome:
confrontation with US military forces, a threat justified by the US assertion that, as demonstrated by the Scarborough Shoal affair, the PRC is a dangerously duplicitous adversary.

The Financial Times makes an
interesting elision by stating “The Obama administration declared South
China Sea a US “national interest” in 2010,” leaving out the rather important
qualifier “in freedom of navigation”. Connoisseurs
of irony are welcome to wonder if the next step will be for the US to declare
this remote basin of rocks, reefs, and shoals 10,000 miles from the homeland a “core
interest”, a formulation for which it excoriated the PRC when it tried to apply
that formulation to its near beyond in 2010.

Today, if the US is simply declaring
a national interest “in the South China Sea” full stop, that would imply, well
pretty much whatever the US wants it to imply.
In practical terms, this means that the United States will have the
luxury of acting unilaterally in its self-defined national interest,
unconstrained by rigid considerations of international law (which the PRC, for
the most part, carefully attempts to parse and the United States, by its failure to ratify the Law of the Sea convention, is on the back foot) or the position of ASEAN (which the
PRC has, for the most part, been successful in splitting).

The US recently took another bite out of the
SCS apple by calling for a construction ban in the South China Sea (the PRC has
been dredging, expanding, and improving some of its island holdings in order to
strengthen its sovereignty claims):

Speaking at a Washington think tank, senior State Department
official Michael Fuchs voiced great concern over the "increasingly tenuous
situation" as an assertive China and five of its smaller neighbors vie for
control of tiny islands and reefs in waters with plentiful fisheries and
potential hydrocarbon reserves.

Fuchs said no claimant was solely responsible for the
tensions, but criticized a pattern of "provocative" behavior by
China.

He detailed a proposal for a voluntary freeze on activities
which escalate tensions, to flesh out a 2002 declaration by China and the
Southeast Asian bloc that calls for self-restraint in the South China Sea. The
U.S. is expected to push the proposal at a gathering of Asian foreign ministers
in Myanmar next month.

Fuchs said the claimants themselves would need to agree on
the terms, but suggested stopping establishment of new outposts and any
construction and land reclamation that would fundamentally change existing
outposts. He also proposed that one claimant should not stop another from
continuing long-standing economic activities in disputed areas.

Apparently the United States has
decided that ASEAN needs an extra push to come up with the proper anti-PRC
policies and, even though the US is not a member of ASEAN, it will be more
pro-active in trying to shape its policies and counter the PRC’s attempts to divide
and influence the forum.

Actually the new US posture—call it
Requiem for the “Honest Broker” or We’re Taking Sides: Got A Problem With that?
was already rolled out for the occasion of the resupply of the Philippine
Marines aboard the hulk of the Sierra Madre on the Thomas Second Shoal in April
2014.

Billed at the time as “plucky Philippine craft
evades hulking PRC maritime patrol vessel”, as I noted in a piece for Asia Times Online, it was actually a choreographed
exercise in alliance anti-PRC pushback, featuring ship loaded to gunwales with
Western journos, US surveillance aircraft overhead, and a suspiciously
fortuitous port call by two Japanese destroyers.

Now, the FT article indeed explicitly characterizes the Sierra Madre resupply as a piece of US pushback, while failing to
note it was something of a Rubicon: de facto support of the Philippines against
the PRC i.e. taking sides in a territorial dispute, something that it would be
difficult to justify in even in terms of enforcing the ASEAN
standstill agreement (since the US is not a party to ASEAN, nor has ASEAN asked
the US to enforce the voluntary agreement on its behalf).

I expect there will be more Rubicons
in the South China Seas’ future.

Perhaps we are now approaching a
situation in which the United States explicitly declares that it will act in
the South China Seas on behalf of the Philippines or Vietnam against the PRC
for the sake of a unilaterally defined US interest.

The need to justify a pretty significant
shift to unilateralism in the US doctrine for the South China Sea is, perhaps,
behind the decision to repackage the US/Del Rosario Scarborough gambit as a
Chinese outrage. That way the US move
can be presented as retaliatory to PRC misbehavior, not as an escalation
provoked by PRC success in gaming the current SCS order.

University of New South Wales in Australia Professor
Carlyle A. Thayer suggested that Vietnam submit a proposal to the UN Security
Council seeking for a debate on China’s illegal oil rig placement in the South
China Sea and its impact on regional security.
Thayer, who is a Southeast Asia regional specialist with special
expertise on Vietnam, said that China, as a world power, may use its veto power
to reject any UNSC resolution. However, at least the international community
will better understand Vietnam’s goodwill and China’s actions, asking China to
withdraw its platform from Vietnam’s waters.

Bear in mind that the United States
usually feels compelled to check off the “tried the UNSC; unreasonably blocked
by PRC and/or Russian veto” box before embarking on some unilateral security
adventure.

As to where this all goes, I
envisage a specific scenario. It relates
to SC-72, a hydrocarbon exploration block off the coast of the Philippine
island of Palawan in a region called Reed or Recto Bank, in a zone that the
Philippines claims lies within its 200-nautical mile EEZ, but the PRC also
claims.

Amid the resource-related bonanza bullshit
that underlies SCS rhetoric, SC-72 might be the real thing, a significant oil
and gas find that will provide a major economic boost to the Philippine economy
and the government’s bottom line. Greed and anxiety concerning SC-72 have been the consistent, unifying thread of
Philippine-PRC maritime disputes including the Scarborough Shoal circus.

The Philippine government designated
a Philippine controlled company, Forum Energy, owned by Philippine’s leading
rich guy Manuel V. Pangilinan (and very close friend of Del Rosario; indeed,
Pangilinan was the informal envoy Del Rosario sent to the PRC when his formal
diplomacy hit a wall and Aquino turned to Trillanes)
to “help assert the Southeast Asian
country's sovereign rights over parts of the South China Sea, claimed by the
Philippines as the West Philippine Sea.”

SC-72 was originally a centerpiece
of prospective PRC-Phillipine cooperation and co-development. The main point of contention was Phillipine
insistence that the PRC acknowledge SC-72 as lying within the Phillipine EEZ,
something that beyond bragging rights would give the Philippine government 100%
share of the royalties. In an
interesting parallel to the PRC/Vietnam/Paracels situation, Pangilinan declared
”his only condition… was for CNOOC to respect the Philippines' rights over Recto
Bank.

When the Philippine
concession-holder sent a survey ship into SC-72 in 2011, a PRC vessel played
chicken-of-the-sea and nearly rammed it.
Nevertheless, the Philippine side has consistently presented SC-72 as a
venue for cooperation with the PRC.

I wonder if this is about to change.

Specifically, I can imagine a
scenario in which the Philippines wins its arbitration suit invalidating the
9-dash line; the Philippines, emboldened by its victory, US support, and the
blandishments of Japan (which is in the process of reinterpreting its
constitution to permit assistance to vital, friendly nations under the banner of "collective self defense") decides to
develop SC-72 without the PRC; the US military closely surveils PRC vessels
attempting to disrupt unilateral Philippine exploration and production efforts…

…and, if necessary, US military
vessels interpose themselves to protect Philippine ships.

Indeed, the Philippine government
recently renewed the concession of Philex Energy to August 2016, which would
give time for the lengthy Arbitral Tribunal process to play out and allow
Philippine ships to sail into Recto Bank waters that are, at least with a
minimal level of ambiguity, Philippine and not Chinese.

Engineering the PRC’s exclusion from
SC-72 might be seen as fitting revenge for Beijing’s presumption in sending
HYSY 981 to drill off the Paracels.

Whether or not the United States
goes beyond Scarborough and Recto and establishes itself as the all-purpose
defender of the UNCLOS rights or claims of the PRC’s neighbors in a brave new
world in which the nine-dash-line has been refuted would presumably depend upon
whether the US can bring itself to ratify UNCLOS itself—a long-standing goal of
the US military and diplomatic establishment, but opposed by US conservatives
as a piece of sovereignty-surrendering trickery.